InsideRIA.com has become a site I check pretty regularly lately. The quality of the posts/articles varies widely but there is always something new to read there. A few weeks ago they ran a little competition to get users to vote for the best RIA of the year so they could showcase it at MAX. It was a bit of a disaster – fake votes, automated voting, hanging chads…. you get the idea. They clearly didn’t realise how much emotional and financial investment goes into web apps and thus didnt anticipate any vote rigging. In the end they just picked the three apps they like the most Aviary, Balsamiq markups and digital tutors.
They then showcased these apps at Max and the video is now online here
If you are developing a flash based RIA then it is certainly worth watching with your morning coffee. However for reasons only understood by the crazed tribe of coders that run the Adobe web site you need to jump forward to 10 mins before it starts – unless you really need to hear 10 minutes of soft pre-session chatter. Also its shown using the worst video component on earth – why oh why does Adobe use such an inferior component to display their flash videos?!
A few things stood out to me about this video.
Aviary lets you edit images, audio and a do bunch of other media editing things that just a few years ago were unthinkable of in a web app. And no one in the audience was impressed, no gasps, hardly any applause. I guess it’s a sign of how far things have come that creating pretty good replica of photoshop in flash isn’t all that impressive.
I did smile when someone asked how many lines of code were in the app. I had a professor at uni who spoke of ancient times when coders used cobalt and were paid based on how many lines of code they wrote, of’course now days lines of code doesn’t mean a lot.
Interestingly the Aviary developer did point out that the Aviary apps are all created by one person per app and most took about a year – which is pretty cool really if you think about it…. you could make your own commercial quality web app all by yourself in a year. Actually that’s kinda what Im doing.
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